Fundamental
Prepare and test your skills
Fundamental
Prepare and test your skills
Serverless Computing Abstracts All Server Management
Free sample question, answered and explained below. The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam practice bank has 688 more like it. Try 10 free: instant score, no account.
A software development team is building an event-driven notification microservice in Azure. The team wants to deploy and run their application code without configuring operating systems, managing virtual machine hardware, or provisioning underlying compute infrastructure.
Which cloud computing model delivers this complete abstraction of server management?
Explanations
Serverless computing
Serverless computing
What Serverless Computing Is
Serverless computing is a cloud execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation, provisioning, and scaling of compute servers. Developers deploy their code—such as microservices or background functions—without configuring, patching, or administering any physical or virtual machines.
How It Meets the Infrastructure Abstraction Requirement
Serverless computing completely abstracts the underlying infrastructure from the developer:
- No server management: Developers never interact with operating systems, web servers, or virtual machines.
- Automatic resource allocation: The cloud platform automatically allocates computing power only when triggered by events.
- Zero maintenance overhead: All platform maintenance, runtime patching, and hardware management are handled behind the scenes by Azure.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- Event-driven execution: Executes functions or tasks in direct response to system events, HTTP requests, timers, or queue messages.
- Elastic scaling: Automatically scales from zero instances up to hundreds of concurrent executions instantly based on workload demand.
- Consumption-based billing: Organizations pay exclusively for the exact compute time and memory consumed while the code executes, incurring zero cost when idle.
- Faster time-to-market: Developers concentrate purely on writing business logic rather than designing infrastructure deployment pipelines.
Why This Is the Optimal Choice
Unlike traditional compute hosting models where developers must choose VM sizes and manage operating systems, serverless computing offers a pure execution layer where all infrastructure provisioning, high availability, and scaling are completely handled by Azure.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) virtual machine provisioning
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) virtual machine provisioning
What IaaS Virtual Machine Provisioning Is
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows organizations to provision and control virtual machines (VMs), virtual networks, and storage disks hosted in the cloud. Provisioning involves setting hostnames, user credentials, operating system distributions, and installing machine agents.
Why It Does Not Meet the Requirement
IaaS represents the opposite of server abstraction:
- Manual management: Developers and system administrators remain directly responsible for configuring operating systems, installing runtime environments, and applying security patches.
- Continuous administration: The customer must configure provisioning agents, disk formatting, network routing, and monitoring tools.
- Fixed provisioning: Servers run continuously and must be manually or semi-automatically scaled using VM scale sets.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Highest administrative overhead: Demands ongoing system administration, maintenance, and updates.
- Direct OS control: Provides full administrative (root/administrator) access to the underlying guest operating system.
- Always-on billing: Virtual machines incur compute costs as long as they are provisioned and running, even when idle.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
A team required full control over the guest operating system kernel, custom networking configurations, legacy software dependencies, and specific provisioning agents.
Additional Context
While cloud provisioning agents can automate initial VM setup, IaaS does not abstract server management away from developers.
HR-driven identity lifecycle provisioning
HR-driven identity lifecycle provisioning
What HR-Driven Identity Lifecycle Provisioning Is
Identity lifecycle provisioning is an automated governance process in identity services like Microsoft Entra ID. It automates creating, updating, and de-provisioning user accounts and security credentials across directory systems when employee status changes in an authoritative human resources (HR) system.
Why It Does Not Meet the Requirement
Identity provisioning is strictly an identity management capability:
- User identity scope: It manages user digital identities, roles, and application access permissions, not compute workloads or server infrastructure.
- No application hosting: It provides no execution environment for running code, services, or event-driven background applications.
- Unrelated to server abstraction: It solves employee onboarding and directory synchronization rather than server hosting or computing requirements.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Automated onboarding: Creates user profiles in directory services when new hires appear in HR platforms.
- Attribute synchronization: Keeps job titles, departments, and manager reporting lines aligned across enterprise applications.
- Security de-provisioning: Disables and revokes application access immediately when an employee departs the organization.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed to automate user account creation and access assignment in Microsoft Entra ID based on employee changes recorded in an HR database.
Additional Context
Identity provisioning operates within identity and access management (IAM) governance and is entirely distinct from compute infrastructure provisioning.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) template deployment
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) template deployment
What Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Is
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice where cloud resources are defined declaratively using code files, such as Bicep files or JSON Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. It enables automated, consistent, and repeatable resource provisioning through deployment pipelines.
Why It Does Not Meet the Requirement
IaC is an automation technique rather than a compute hosting model:
- Explicit infrastructure definitions: IaC requires developers to explicitly specify and maintain the infrastructure components, templates, parameters, and quotas needed for a deployment.
- Tooling vs. abstraction: IaC automates how infrastructure is created, but it does not remove the operational burden of managing or executing servers.
- Resource management focus: Deploying templates still results in underlying resources (like VMs or app plans) that require management.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Declarative syntax: Defines the desired target state of Azure infrastructure in version-controlled template files.
- Deployment stacks: Manages collections of provisioned resources as cohesive lifecycle units across subscriptions.
- Repeatability: Eliminates manual configuration errors during resource creation across multiple environments.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization wanted to automate the repeatable deployment of complex multi-tier Azure resource environments through continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
Additional Context
Serverless solutions often utilize IaC to deploy serverless resources, but IaC itself does not define the runtime compute abstraction model.
Try 10 interactive questions like this one, free
Answer them yourself and get your score the moment you finish. No account needed.
Full access includes
- 688 practice questions across all 3 exam domains
- Every answer explained: why it is right, and why the others are not
- Scout, an AI tutor that answers your follow-up questions
- Readiness tracking by domain, so you know when to book the exam
Related questions
Keep the momentum going with these hand-picked practice scenarios
FundamentalAZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam
Azure Functions Scale to Zero
Describe serverless
FundamentalAZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam
Azure Functions Trigger
Describe serverless
FundamentalAZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam
Serverless Computing
Describe serverless
FundamentalAZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam
Serverless Consumption Plan
Describe serverless
FundamentalAZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam
Serverless Scaling to Zero and Per-Second Billing
Describe serverless
AdvancedAZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam
Availability Zones High Availability
Deploy virtual machines to availability zones and availability sets
Last updated Validated